Various Sundries

Massive reading and homework day. I finished Jane Hirshfield's Ink Dark Moon, the first section of Pound's letters covering 1914-1916, and am working my way through Bidart's In the Western Night. Tomorrow I have to finish reading my Greeks. I need to work in a couple of essays, but so far I feel like I'm on top of things for this packet. This is good, because I've got a little over a week to finish my stuff up and get it sent off.

I'm still writing a lot of poems, a lot of throat clearing but once that stuff's out of the way, the follow-ups are pretty fun. I've reached a point where I don't give a real shit. I'm tossing it all out there. That seems to me the real luxury of graduate study--you read a lot and you write a lot and try everything you possibly can. I can't say that the reading so far has had much impact on what I think aesthetically--but it's opened me up to options and rethinking what my idea of poetry is and might be.

And given that my reading list is a continuum running from Archilochos and Sappho to Bob Hicok, how can I complain?

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Evie has proven herself to be a tough little dog. When I took her out today, someone's three plott hounds were hanging around our yard. She went ballistic and ran all of them off. I kept see-sawing back between being scared for her and amused.

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I got my galleys of OCHO #22. It's a fantastic issue. I sat last night and scrolled through it instead of doing homework. It's a real mix of established and new poets and a diverse survey of current queer poetry. More pimping once I know the issue is available.